Novelist Arundhati Roy could be charged with sedition

The Indian Home Ministry has given Delhi police the go-ahead to arrest bestselling novelist andactivist Arundhati Roy on charges of sedition. The charges relate to a recent event at which Roy appeared with Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelan. Roy has issued a statement in response to the news:

The End of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities in the UK?

There is currently a strange mood here in the UK after the Comprehensive Spending Review of last week. In my opinion most people have not yet understood what is going to hit them but nevertheless get a growing feeling that something is changing for the worse. Life won?t be as it has been in the last 10 years.

In Praise of Copying, CC-licensed book from Harvard Uni Press

Pidg sez, “Harvard University Press have released author Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, under a Creative Commons license – and decided to release the full text as a free PDF.”  “Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. ………….

The Civic Task of Philosophy

As the UNESCO Philosophy Day nears its opening in one month in Tehran, it is time to reflect on the civic role of philosophy in today?s world. We live in a time of widespread ethical relativism which has created for the new generation an attitude of “anything goes”, and, not unconnected with this, in a time of widespread public skepticism about the critical role of philosophy. Much of the public has come to believe that a Socratic commitment to the pursuit of truth is a waste of time and an idealistic way of living in our globalized world. Philosophers are presented as insignificant inventors of concepts whose sole aim in life is to struggle to get tenure-track job in North American and European universities.

Rome Wasn?t Digitized in a Day

Via AWOL:

Request for Comment: Rome Wasn?t Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists

Infrastructure for Humanities Scholarship

CLIR and Tufts University are engaging scholars and academic librarians in examining the services and digital objects classicists have developed, the future needs of the discipline, and the roles of libraries and other curatorial institutions in fostering the infrastructure on which the core intellectual activities of classics and many other disciplines depend. We envision a set of shared services layered over a distributed storage architecture that is seamless to end users, allows multiple contributors, and leverages institutional resources and facilities. Much of this architecture exists at individual projects and institutions; the challenge is to identify the suite of shared services to be developed.